Back from the Mostly Dead

Well, its been a while but I have good excuses. Last week we spent in Idaho/Sun Valley with my family, and I'll post pictures of that later. It was a really fun vacation and made leaving my family that much harder. I am currently sitting in the University of Tennessee library---so we made it to Knoxville. (I have a nervous feeling that someone is going to kick me off this computer and tell me I don't belong here--hopefully that will go away soon). On Monday we spent all day packing up our truck and cleaning and didn't leave Provo until 7 at night, which was bad because we had to make an 8 hour drive that night. Between eating and gas stops and the time change, we made our hotel in Nebraska by5 am, just in time of 2 hours of sleep before hitting the road again. Then we proceeded to drive all day until 4 am, when we arrived at Chris's parents house in Indiana. I thought I was going to die. Literally, it was taking so long that I had inner pain from the hopeless feeling that we weren't going to make it. I had to sleep through the second-half of Illinois just to prevent an emotional breakdown. That night (Tuesday) we got 4 hours of sleep and headed to Knoxville. On the way we stopped in Ohio to drop off our comrade, Matt, who rode out from Provo with us, served as a third driver, and shared the cost of gas.

A big shout-out to Matt. Chris and I talked about the fact that we would be dead somewhere in Iowa or possibly Illinois if Matt were not with us. Thanks Matt!!!! We owe you . . . well, our lives.

Anyway, we finally made it to Knoxville (after going through 10 states) and it is amazingly beautiful. Just hills and mountains of trees. I've never seen so many trees in one place, its crazy. The weather is really mild right now, but our apartment manager said "the dog-days are fixin' to move in", which I'm guessing means it will get worse before fall hits. Everything feels so foreign, so different. When we walked into our apartment it smelled like cigarette smoke, not too bad, but enough. I had been planning on our apartment being the one place where I could escape from all the craziness that is this new place, so when it smelled like smoke I started sobbing like a baby. It was the straw that broke the camel's back, as they say. But we got some Febreeze and some oranges and some vinegar lying around the place and its better already. Our carpet is brand new so it doesn't smell, so I have hope that it will clear out. (Anyone know any other tricks to getting the smell of cigarette smoke out?) Our home can be a haven yet. Speaking of our apartment, though, other than the smell its really really nice and I'll get pictures out as soon as its all set up--so you can plan on about a month. I'm such a ball of crazy mixed emotions right now. I love it here already, but still hate it. I'm so excited but so nervous. So happy but so scared. I'm sure once I get used to everything it will be great. I keep thinking about how scared I was to go to BYU and then how scared I was to move to Indiana, and now how much I love those places. Granted, this is a much scarier move than either of those, but I think that only means I'll love it that much more. Sorry, I'm droning on and on. This post is more for me than it is for you. Oh, and everything is orange here. The football stadium in huge--and orange. The library looks like a ziggarat on the outside and the Smithsonian on the inside. The area code for phone numbers is 865, which you'll notice spells "VOL". Everyone sounds like Mater on the Pixar movie Cars. But people are incredibly nice, so Southern hospitality lives. All in all things are going great. Oh, and nobody uses a blinker to change lanes out here. They just move on over to the other lane. It got to the point on the freeway where I felt like a nerd when I used my blinker to change lanes because I was obeying the rules so closely. But at the same time everyone follows the speed limit exactly because there are cops everywhere. Ok, thats the end of my random Tennessee observations.

The only really tragic part about this all is we don't have cable until Friday and we've missed the Olympics all week. Boooo! I heart the Olympics.

And I heart all of you. Keep in touch. I'm not dead, I was just mostly dead there for a while.